Reflection Reading Two

Reading Response
This reflective paper describes my understanding of the main idea/points of the assigned article,
titled “The curriculum? That’s just a unit outline, isn’t it?, by Sharon P. Fraser & Agnes
M. Bosanquet. Further, this paper expends my perspective about the article, and statement of
agreement with the authors.
The main points in the article is categorization of educator’s perceptions about the word
curriculum. The researcher categorized interview’s data into the following;

Category A: The structure and content of a unit (subject);

Category B: The structure and content of a program of study;

Category C: The students’ experience of learning;

Category D: A dynamic and interactive process of teaching and learning.
Through Habermas framework analysis of the above categories were further explained into
three interests; technical interest, practical interest and emancipatory interest. The researcher
argued that the category A and B displays technical interest. The people in this category believe
that curriculum control and express students learning. Furthermore, curriculum is designed by
some subject specialist through assuming students’ needs and curriculum change is reviewing
subject outline. While, category C displays, practical interest. People in this category consider
curriculum as student’s learning experience that aims to prepare students for the market and
curriculum change is market demand. However, category D, displays resemblance with
category C but their ultimate goals set them apart in emancipatory interest. The curriculum,
those activities and experiences that help student transformation to the consciousness.
Therefore, they involve their learners as active participants, make learning meaningful and set
a focal point for the learning and curriculum is generated through students and facilitators
interaction during teaching learning process.
I really appreciate the researchers thought of conceptualizing educators believes about
curriculum. As the researchers argues that curriculum is widely use in the everyday educational
phenomena but the meaning to the same word varies in contexts as well as the person using it.
This article will provide educators propulsion thinking to agree on one solid definition for the
word curriculum.
In this paper, the authors hold my agreement for the analysis, emancipatory interest is ‘a
transformation of consciousness. For me, the ultimate goal of education is to build empowered
and autonomous individuals who can reason and critic the human practices an order to improve
them, according to the ideological and philosophical foundations. Therefore, the curriculum
should not be limited to subject matter or organization and structure of program, nor merely to
learner active teaching-learning process but rather it should be a shared and collaborative
efforts that insures students learning and holistic development.
While reading the researcher arguments, I felt myself in the same dark room. Today, being
educators, we attach different meaning to curriculum in higher education. As student and
primary school teachers, we were given books labelled as curriculum, that promoted the notion
that curriculum is the subject matter, carrying same experiences to university level introduce
us to troubles as in higher education, no book but outlines are consider the only curriculum.
This article helped me in comparing all my experiences about curriculum and identifying the
category I belong to. This also helped me in describing the pros and cons of each category in
order to make our position clear for further improvement.